Business adaptation to climate change: American ski resorts and warmer temperatures

Abstract

How do firms adapt to the intensity of adverse chronic conditions stemming from the natural environment? We seek to contribute to the debate on whether environmental adversity tends to be positively or negatively related to adaptation. We propose that both diverging perspectives tend to predict part of firms' adaptation to nature adversity intensity. This is because of the interplay between latent counterbalancing mechanisms. First, at mild levels of nature adversity intensity, organizational inertial forces constrain organizations' willingness to adapt. Second, at medium levels of nature adversity intensity, coalition building and internal organizational politics allow managers to deploy adaptation resilience capabilities. Third, at severe levels, growing natural forces eventually impose limits beyond which protective adaptation becomes unviable. Our findings from a 2001 to 2013 analysis of western U.S. ski resorts' adaptation to temperature conditions indicate that firms facing medium levels of nature adversity intensity appear more likely to engage in higher levels of adaptation whereas those experiencing lower and higher intensity show a tendency for lower levels of adaptation, yielding an inverted U‐shaped relationship.

Winter Sports Resorts and Natural Environment—Systematic Literature Review Presenting Interactions between Them

“…This is a challenge and a field for future, further research. At the moment, the most important of them seems to be the limitation of research and conclusions in most publications [36,37,40,46,55,71,87,112,116] to resorts located only in a specific smaller or larger region, with highly reduced possibilities of extending these results to other locations. There are no reviews that synthesize conclusions obtained in different regions, which would allow to identify key factors that affect the scale of threats in individual resorts.…”

“…With this approach, the scale of the impact of climate warming could be indicated at various points in time and dependent on how this change developed. This research was conducted in multiple regions of the world, starting from the USA and Canada [36,40,87,116], through the Alpine countries [37,46,112] and the Pyrenees [71,82], ending with Japan [55] and India [77]. It is worth noting that in different parts of the world, i.e., in different resorts, conclusions of the analyses were different from resort to resort.…”

“…Resort managers adjusted to the annual fluctuations in the weather, rather than to a long-term change [69]. As a result, actions were often taken as a reaction to the changes that took place and were already seen, rather than those anticipated, and decision makers in resorts that were less exposed to climate warming threat were less inclined to implement adaptation measures [40]. There was widespread belief that artificial snowmaking on ski runs is effective [69]; in some cases, the need to diversify the resort's activities and to increase the off-season revenues was also emphasized [78,89].…”

When do threats mobilize managers for organizational change toward sustainability? An environmental belief model

“…Findings based on objective metrics (i.e., temperature) from the ski tourism industry (Rivera & Clement, 2019) suggest that changes that involve protective measures occur most frequently when the intensity of environmental adversity is at a medium level, whereas high and low levels of adversity seem not to lead to changes at all. The authors surmised that at low levels of adversity intensity, "organizational inertial forces constrain organizations' willingness to adapt."…”

Climate impacts on geographical changes in the energy industry

“…Furthermore, the risk of shutting down solar and solar power plants increases, and there can be a reduction in hydropower capacity. As such, the harmful effects of climate change become more widespread, making it an increasingly important issue needing to be addressed by the government (Rivera & Clement, 2019).…”